AudioBoom, the UK podcasting company backed by property investor Nick Candy, will be merged with larger US rival Triton Digital in a £134m deal that will allow them to expand in the fast-growing market for radio advertising.

The management of US-based Triton, which is controlled by private equity group Vector Capital, will take control of the enlarged company if the deal goes ahead.

Founded in 2009 by British entrepreneur Mark Rock with backing from Channel 4’s now-defunct innovation fund, 4ip, AudioBoom was originally a platform where users could upload their own recordings and interviews.

In 2012, investors brought in a new chief executive, Robert Proctor, former chief operating officer of social media group Reality Digital, to transform the company into a platform for professional audio content. The company has since established partnerships with groups including the BBC, Cumulus Media and India Today.

AudioBoom, an Aim-listed group, on Tuesday revealed plans to combine with its US rival under a so-called “reverse takeover”, a structure typically used to acquire a public company by a private company that allows the private group to avoid the cost of going public itself.

Streaming music has got where it has today largely by being the future of retail and replacing the download model, which in turn replaced the CD model (though vestiges of both remain). That premium model will continue to be the beating heart of streaming revenues for the foreseeable future but will not be enough on its own. The next big opportunity for streaming is to become the future of radio, which incidentally is around double the size of the recorded music market. In doing so, it will be a classic case of disruptive insurgents stealing market share from long-standing incumbents.

The opportunity for streaming is to build ad revenue around the younger audiences that are simply not engaging with traditional radio in the way that previous generations of young music fans once did. As the chart above shows, radio’s audience is aging and has an almost mirror opposite demographic profile to streaming. What is more, radio’s audience is declining by around one percentage point each quarter. It might not sound like much, but you normally do not measure change in terms of consistent quarterly trends. Instead there is normally quarterly fluctuation. So, this is nothing short of a major decline.

However, what is interesting is that free streaming is not growing by the same rate radio is declining. Instead, what is happening is that radio and streaming audiences are co-existing, with many that have spent a long time doing both eventually shifting all of their listening to streaming. Added to this, older consumers tend to embrace change more slowly than younger audiences. So, radio’s older listener base effectively acts as a disruption buffer.

What all this means is that radio is facing an existential threat like no other but it has some time to get its house in order, to identify how it can meld the best of the radio model with streaming experiences to start its fight back. And make no mistake, radio has so many unique assets that streaming does not (local content, talk, news, sports, weather, travel, brand personality etc.) and Apple’s underwhelming success with Beats 1 shows that hiring a bunch of radio people and launching a station does not guarantee success. Nonetheless, streaming services will get there. And Spotify’s recently launched Pandora-clone in Australia indicates just how serious the radio frontier is to streaming.

Pippa Rimmer, head of app products for Radio France sees voice assistants as an important distribution channel beyond the smart speakers and the entire space represents the revenge of radio. Why revenge? After many years of digital focus on written and video content, voice assistants put audio back into the spotlight. That is clearly where radio shines despite forays into other media. Rimmer expanded on point of view during a panel discussion at the Smart Voice Summit in Paris last week.

TuneIn presentation @ European Radio and Digital Audio Show 2018 A look at TuneIn’s core benefits – one directory multiple platforms. Devices, reach, models, developments. A review of the drivers and appetite for subscription models in Europe. By Miles Palmer, representative of TuneIn for Europe.

The program of The European Radio and Digital Audio Show 2018 is coorganized by Nicolas Moulard (Actuonda) and Xavier Filliol (Les Editions de l'Octet) in collaboration with Phiippe Chapot (Editions HF). www.salondelaradio.comwww.european-show.radio

This event is part of the EBU Digital Radio Week, 12-15 February 2018.

The traditional starting point of the EBU Digital Radio Week, Radiohack brings together coders, solderers and thinkers to collaborate and innovate together. Over two days, hackers are invited to work on new ideas and technologies or explore how existing ones can be linked together to create something of use to broadcasters and content makers.

Participants include broadcasters, device manufacturers or just those with a passion for radio and technology. The projects cover new Hybrid services, measurement tools, interactive radios, open source digital broadcasting platforms and much more.

Participants are only required to bring some fresh thinking and an open mind. The event itself is informal and is also a great chance to meet like-minded people from around Europe and beyond.

Following reports from last November, Google Play has introduced audiobooks in its store, alongside ebooks and comics.

The company has launched the new section in 45 countries and supports nine languages. You can play your purchased titles in the Google Play Books app on Android, iOS and desktop, as well on Assistant-powered devices like Google Home – which means you don’t need your phone handy to listen to them. The company says that it’ll remember where you left off and sync your progress across devices, so you can pick up from that point on anything you’re signed into.

DAX by Global gives advertisers a single buying point across 180 digital audio platforms including Soundcloud, Radionomy and radio brands including Global, the media & entertainment group’s Capital and Radio X and Bauer Media’s Kiss in the UK. Global created DAX because there was no easy way for advertisers to reach the growing number of people listening to audio on digital devices. In the UK every week over 24 million (MIDAS Plus Winter 2017) people stream digital audio and this figure is growing. In November 2017, DAX launched in France and Germany.

At the end of 2017, DAX became the world’s largest digital audio advertising platform by acquiring US-based digital audio ad sales company, AudioHQ and rebranding. This gives Global an ad sales and ad tech footprint in the US and makes DAX the largest digital audio advertising platform in the world reaching 160 million listeners.

Presented by David Cooper, Head of DAX Sales (EU)

The program of The European Radio and Digital Audio Show 2018 is coorganized by Nicolas Moulard (Actuonda) and Xavier Filliol (Les Editions de l'Octet) in collaboration with Phiippe Chapot (Editions HF). www.salondelaradio.comwww.european-show.radio

Propelled by what we can legitimately call The Alexa Movement, voice is now perceived as the future of the User Interface. But we need numbers: How many of us continue to use Alexa (or Siri, or Google assistant) after the novelty has worn off? What do we use it for?This will help us understand the likely actual future of Voice UI.

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